


binary

by lucidities (incendiarism)



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space, Angst, Betrayal, F/F, Homesickness, Hopeful Ending, Lesbians in Space, fairytale metaphors, it's about the yearning, not as angsty as the summary makes it out to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:10:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26330125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incendiarism/pseuds/lucidities
Summary: Knowing that you did something awful for noble reasons doesn’t make the guilt any less. It just tightens the knot in your throat whenever it’s brought up, worsens the feeling of being torn in half along the perforated lines that you punched with your own two hands.
Relationships: Ha Sooyoung | Yves/Jung Jinsol | Jinsoul
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48
Collections: 姐妹 exchange!!





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [dimsum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimsum/gifts).
  * Inspired by [distance modulus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24734968) by [fenying](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fenying/pseuds/fenying). 



> a big and grand happy belated birthday to hui!! my apologies for not getting this out on your actual day of birth, but inspiration is a fickle bitch. this is Not your jiemei exchange fic, but i suppose you can consider it as an appetizer? anyways please enjoy!! thank you for being the greatest friend and greatest jiejie that i could ask for.
> 
> to anyone else reading: this fic is a remix, and makes a lot more sense if you read the original work first!! i would highly recommend it, both to get context for this story and to experience hui's lovely writing.

> **Double Star (Binary Star):** Two stars that lie very close to, and are often orbiting, each other. Line-of-sight doubles are a consequence of perspective and aren’t physically related. Many stars are multiples (doubles, triples, or more) gravitationally bound together. Usually such stars orbit so closely that they appear as a single point of light even when viewed through professional telescopes.

When Sooyoung was still a kid back on Earth, she fell in love with fairytales. Fell in love with pretty kingdoms and noble quests and charming characters. The classic bedtime stories that she would be tucked in with, bubbly with contentment. The ones she learned to recite with her eyes closed, always beginning with _once-upon-a-time_ and ending with _happily-ever-after_.

“Of course you liked stuff like that,” Jinsol tells her when she mentions it one day, lying across from each other in their bedroom. She rolls her eyes, smiles underneath the dim glow from the string lights dangling from the walls. “Of course. You’ve been a hopeless romantic from day one, eh?”

Sooyoung laughs, throws one of her stuffed animals at Jinsol, tells her to shut up. “Well, what did you like then?” she asks in return, before doing her fair share of teasing back as Jinsol launches into a retelling of her favorite novel about space pirates. Space pirates, of all things.

A bit ironic, all things considered. But we’ll get there.

And Sooyoung, Sooyoung is good at this. This easy back-and-forth she has with Jinsol, the flow that they’ve been keeping up for ages. Covering for each other’s blind spots when they’re on a job, falling into simple cohabitation when they’re not. Trading jabs as easily as they do all their secrets. Sooyoung takes a little longer than Jinsol to open up, but she always makes it there in the end—telling her everything in the hours of the night when both of them should be sleeping.

Or, well. Almost everything.

Sooyoung is good at this too: pushing down the twinge in her chest she gets watching Jinsol pilot, reining in her foolish, traitor of a heart. Shoving all of it away as Jinsol continues to ramble about her pirates and life-on-the-line adventures. She’s well-versed after years and years of only having Jinsol as constant company.

It’s only long after the other is asleep—words trailing off into nonsense, breath evening out to join the ever-present humming of the machinery of the ship—that Sooyoung dares to fantasize about her own happily ever after, her own perfect ending.

—

Of course, she’s never been that lucky.

She’s trying to finally get over herself. Write her own story, work towards _something_ with Jinsol. Before it’s too late—the cosmos are ancient; they have the luxury of eternity. Sooyoung and Jinsol are, by comparison, unabashedly mortal, and after a nasty run-in with a few Hypolydian monsters, Sooyoung realizes that she can’t afford waiting.

She makes plans. Cheesy ones that would probably invoke that same fond eye-roll from Jinsol if she ever caught wind of them, but Sooyoung makes sure to keep her itinerary under wraps. One last thing to hide, she figures, before she finally comes clean with all the feelings that have welled up over time.

This is how things are supposed to go:

There’s a river that Jinsol had taken them to see the first time Sooyoung visited Phyrgia. It’s tucked into a patch of woods, cute and quaint. Sooyoung had pushed Jinsol into the water when she got too close to look at the minnows, and Jinsol dragged Sooyoung along with her soon after. They’d gone back to their ship hours later, shivering and sopping wet but laughing all the way, and Sooyoung had felt a little bit like melting into a puddle of mush as Jinsol toweled her hair dry.

This time, Sooyoung wants to take them back, go camping, watch the stars when they come out. Jinsol will trace constellations that Sooyoung’s never managed to memorize; Sooyoung will say _hey, maybe there’s a brain underneath all that blonde after all_ and get whacked for it in return. And then Sooyoung will point out the planets blinking amongst the glimmering stars that they’ve visited before, and Jinsol will listen and nod along even though she was there with Sooyoung the whole time.

And of course, the triumphant moment, Sooyoung finally sucks it up and tells Jinsol that she’s in love with her, has been in love with her since maybe the moment Jinsol crash-landed into her life. Maybe.

—

What really happens is that on their way to Mixolydia, Sooyoung gets a comm from Vivi. The message consists of how Phrygia’s gone dark, how the entire planet is teeming with overwrought tension, civil war breaking out in bands. Her words are composed, professional as usual, but Sooyoung can sense the slight hint of something that’s not panic, not quite, but worry tittering underneath.

_You can’t let Jinsol find out; you know how she is. You have to stop her from getting back here. No matter what._

It’s one more secret. One more nail in the coffin that Sooyoung builds for herself when she makes up her mind.

Maybe she is lucky after all, because one fucked up return payment gives her everything she needs to work out a cover story after she calls the cops on them—one that gets Jinsol locked up with no chance of making it to Phrygia, one that lets Sooyoung walk out untouched.

Sitting there in the courtroom, giving her entirely made-up testament, Sooyoung wrings out her hands over and over again. It’s the only sign of nervousness that she allows herself to have amidst her flawless lying, a tell that Jinsol could probably pick out in seconds. Which is why she keeps her hands hidden behind the witness stand and her gaze focused forward.

Not that it really matters—Jinsol doesn’t have anyone to prove her innocence, and all the evidence against her, albeit false, is effectively damning.

And as Jinsol is hit with half a lifetime sentence in prison, Sooyoung knows that she’s sealed in her own fate as well, her fate as being written down as the villain in Jinsol’s book. The princess’s story gone wrong, stabbing her hero in the back, the threads of their fantasy unravelling until it’s nothing but a few silly strings in jaded hands.

—

Homesickness is a tricky thing.

Sooyoung is Terran. The second time her and Jinsol meet is right as Earth implodes on itself, rendering her planetless.

Planetless—there’s a sort of grand terror that comes with that thought. An incomprehensible feeling of being utterly lost to the gaping jaws of the universe, inky and massive and starving, when your entire world is literally destroyed. When your people are now near-extinct and the few remaining are scattered light-years apart from each other, when everyone around you can only look on with a mixed expression of sympathy and pity as you ache for a place that’s nothing more than space-dust.

Sooyoung is over it. Or at least tries hard to be—tries to remember the good instead of dwelling too long on the hollowness buried in her ribcage, the sour taste in her mouth. She writes down everything she can, detailing the blue skies and green trees and beige houses. She tells stories of her time on Earth, stuff about the squirrels in her backyard and her mother’s cooking, to anyone who'll hear her out.

At first, Jinsol is her main audience—indulging her in the downtime between deliveries, eyes wide and lips rounding into a perfect ‘o’ as she listens. Later on, Sooyoung turns to others like Heejin and Hyejoo, but she finds that no one is quite the same as Jinsol.

Because, after all their time together, maybe Jinsol is a little piece of home for Sooyoung too now. Maybe Jinsol is as familiar as the smile lines on her father’s face, as the glow-in-the-dark stars that used to be plastered to her bedroom ceiling. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Jinsol would probably coo at her if she ever admitted it out loud. Pinch Sooyoung’s cheeks, call her cute, label her a sucker for the sentimental. Or, she would, if she wasn’t sat rotting in a cell somewhere, probably imagining all the ways she’s going to murder Sooyoung when she gets her hands on her.

Ouch.

The ship is painfully empty without Jinsol there. Sooyoung mistakes the creaking of the engine for footsteps, the star-cast shadows for the other girl’s figure. Sometimes, when she’s piloting and she takes a turn poorly, she almost closes her eyes and waits for Jinsol to shove her out of the seat, chide her for messing up, take over and fix everything. The moment never arrives though, and it’s with a sinking feeling in her stomach and a quiet voice in her head that Sooyoung knows she’s the cause of that blank space.

Knowing that you did something awful for noble reasons doesn’t make the guilt any less. It just tightens the knot in your throat whenever it’s brought up, worsens the feeling of being torn in half along the perforated lines that you punched with your own two hands.

Sooyoung’s still got hope though.

It’s why she sets the ship’s navigation system towards the wayward planet that houses all the most wanted criminals on this side of the galaxy—and her best friend. It’s why she gets Hyejoo to fish out the guard’s rotation schedules and alter them just enough to give her an opening. It’s why she sets aside the memory of the burning hatred that had stained Jinsol’s features the last time they were in the same room and prays that Jinsol will listen.

Sooyoung likes her classic fairytales, sure. But she’s not above rewriting the story to be in her favor, she’s not above manipulating things to churn out the golden ending that she’d dreamed of. She’ll scrap this storyline, switch it out for something brighter, more optimistic. With Jinsol.

She’s always been a sucker for a happily-ever-after. Maybe the stars will agree this time around.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! as always, any and all comments are welcome. another happy belated birthday to hui, i love you!! hope that my brainchild of two days was pleasing + that nothing i say in this fic contradicts with anything stated in distance modulus!!
> 
> twt: [@nanodarlings](https://twitter.com/nanodarlings)  
> cc: [aphelions](https://curiouscat.me/aphelions)  
> 


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